July 27, 2023

The Mythmakers, by Keziah Weir

Okay, hear me out: Lily King’s Writers and Lovers meets Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife (which it directly references!), with a healthy and surprising sprinkling of astrophysics and consideration of the possibility of a multiverse. I LOVED this book, The Mythmakers, the fiction debut by Keziah Weir, a senior editor at Vanity Fair (who has British Columbia ties, so the book gets to be Canadian!). It’s about Sal, a struggling magazine writer whose life has just imploded and who is surprised, no, perhaps enchanted, to find herself within the pages of The Paris Review as a character in a story by an older author she’d met at a book launch years before. But then she reads the story’s introductory text to discover that the author, Martin Scott Keller, had recently died, and also that the story is an excerpt from his final novel, a long-awaited text. Well, naturally, Sal wants to read the rest of the story, and concocts a scheme wherein she connects with his widow under the guise of writing a magazine piece about the experience of discovering herself in fiction, but then the story becomes more tangled than that, too tangled for magazine piece, even long-form.

The Mythmakers is rich and absorbing, a fast gripping-thrill, but also deeply literary, about the nature of story and storytelling, and also the nature of the universe, and of marriage, and love, and the way myths—in particular that of the male genius—are propagated and upheld. It’s a story about art, and art-making, and science, and sexual politics, and gender, and it’s also slightly uncanny, it’s narrative voice hard to pin down, sometimes Sal, sometimes Martin, or Moira, his wife, but is it really?

Who’s telling the story? Who’s pulling the strings?